A while ago on this site I mentioned that the galleries were a temporary gig. I have been looking for a way to replace them for a while now and I think I’ve got the solution. Here’s the team:

- On the back-end we have the mighty NextGen gallery. It’s a plugin available for Wordpress by Alex Rabe. NextGen Gallery is a fantastic piece of work allowing such niceties as a web interface to upload an FTP file and have it automatically added to a gallery. It will allow for growth and has much more flexibility then the regular WordPress galleries.

- On the front-end we have a plugin to the NextGen gallery. I wanted a specific look and interface to interacting and viewing the photos, but I did not want to be stuck using a flash interface. What I found was JonDesign’s SmoothGallery made to work with NextGen gallery through a plugin by Bruno Guimaraes. It required some heavy modification, which was accomplished thanks to some CSS knowledge, the helpful folks at the JonDesign forums (sps196 in particular), and sheer luck.

It’s not perfect and to me it feels a tad shaky — like the whole script may just self-destruct at any moment — but it looks beautiful and does not require flash. Eventually the one gallery will expand into various sub-sections, but before I do that I want there to be purpose and reason driving the organization. For now, I think this will work. Visit the gallery.